The LAST GEN console capabilities thread.

[DeadlyNinja]

I saw something in the Far Cry thread and I just remembered something. We've seen EMBM used to render water on the Cube, but as far as I can tell, nobody bothered to use EMBM to render other non-liquid surfaces. I mean, if they can use it to render water, why can't they use it on other surfaces to gives it extra detail on the Gamecube? Is it some technical limitation, or is it the lack of time/budget to implement it on GC? If you look at Mario Galaxy, that game practically spams EMBM all over the place.

 

[Lazy8s]

The advantages in image quality of Dreamcast games were their more frequent use of 640x480 resolution in both the front and back frame buffers, their more consistent use of 32 bit frame buffers, their near-32 bit floating-point Z buffering, and their more frequent support for proscan.

Field rendering was actually rarely used in PS2 titles; quite a few high profile games used it, though, which made the issue seem more widespread than it really was.

The main disadvantage in image quality of PS2 games was, as said, their lack of proper mipmapping, accounting only for a texture's distance and not its incline.

Sony extensively tested PS2 software several years ago and analyzed performance and design techniques.

http://www.technology.scee.net/sceesite/files/presentations/PSP/HowFarHaveWeGot.pdf

EA also benchmarked the various platforms several years ago.

 

[swaaye]

Wow look at the NV2A spank that Radeon 8500. I'd say that we can mostly chalk that up to efficiency of the software on the Xbox. Or, to put it another way, the lack of Windows-induced inefficiencies.

 

[Mobius1aic]

I saw something in the Far Cry thread and I just remembered something. We've seen EMBM used to render water on the Cube, but as far as I can tell, nobody bothered to use EMBM to render other non-liquid surfaces. I mean, if they can use it to render water, why can't they use it on other surfaces to gives it extra detail on the Gamecube? Is it some technical limitation, or is it the lack of time/budget to implement it on GC? If you look at Mario Galaxy, that game practically spams EMBM all over the place.

Didn't Super Mario Sunshine use EMBM for the water? I think RE4 used the same or a similar technique as well.

 

[fearsomepirate]

nobody bothered to use EMBM to render other non-liquid surfaces.

Regenerators and almost all boss creatures in RE4, several boss creatures in Twilight Princess, item models and certain creatures in RE0 and REMake, item surfaces in Pikmin 2, corridor walls in Rebel Strike, some metallic surfaces in Star Fox: Assault's final mission, possibly the bricks in Luigi's Mansion, entrance surface in WWE: DOR2. Again, just because you personally don't notice effects doesn't mean they aren't there.

"Hazuki Ryo," go over to IGN and look at some screens and vids for SCIII, then tell me that the DC is anywhere near as powerful as the PS2. This should be unsurprising. All the clockspeeds on DC are slower than on PS2, it has less overall bandwidth, it has less main RAM, and the CPU isn't nearly as sophisticated for geometry-related tasks. It had a few advantages related to image quality and texturing, mainly due to larger VRAM and a few features on the graphics chip, but that's it.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Regenerators and almost all boss creatures in RE4, several boss creatures in Twilight Princess, item models and certain creatures in RE0 and REMake, item surfaces in Pikmin 2, corridor walls in Rebel Strike, some metallic surfaces in Star Fox: Assault's final mission, possibly the bricks in Luigi's Mansion, entrance surface in WWE: DOR2. Again, just because you personally don't notice effects doesn't mean they aren't there.

Yeah, I should have worded that question better. I've never played every Cube game so it was more like based on my hazy memory that it might have been used, but can't for the life of me remember if it's due to faulty memory.. Now that you mention TP, I seem to recall a few bosses making use of it. I don't own any of the RE games, and it's been FAR too long since I've played Pikimin 2.

 

[JNewt427]

I heard once that the PS2 at it's release had to be approved by the US military for it's importation into the United States from Japan. Something about it being a super computer!! HA!!!!!!!!!

or is that all a fary tale?

 

[Nesh]

yeah I remember such news. Even the CNN said something about it I think

 

[nAo]

Those EA PS2 numbers were not exactly amazing...

 

[Gitaroo]

anyone played Hitman Blood money for PS2? It was the only PS2 game that you can clearly see normal mapping in game even though its very very low quality. Path of Neo is barely noticeable.

 

[Fafalada]

Those EA PS2 numbers were not exactly amazing...

Not to mention that benchmarking single object renderers is by far the least interesting number you can possibly provide on any platform, but especially so on PS2.
And I would like to say that this was restricted to only early era of PS2 software - but then I've seen people still attempting things like syncing Path3 on per texture basis back in 2005, and that's only one of the many similar stupid things you can do if your objective is to underutilize the hardware.

 

[The_legend_of_drtre]

Cube's biggest problem (and Wii's) is that darned banding caused by the hardware's inability to run at a high enough color depth... The Cube games (and Wii Zelda) have an annoying tendency to have swimming, aliased textures too (perhaps bad mip mapping).

Wii Zelda has both loads of color banding and texture aliasing. Rather disgusting, IMO....

I was under the impression that Cube only has super-sampled AA and that it can only use it under a lower resolution? I'm not really sure anymore though...

"Wii zelda" is the same as the GC version. There were no differences outside of wd screen support. Sounds like a GC problem. Not a Wii problem.

 

[swaaye]

Yeah that could very well be. I haven't played any real Wii games other than Wii Sports.

 

[I.S.T.]

"Wii zelda" is the same as the GC version. There were no differences outside of wd screen support. Sounds like a GC problem. Not a Wii problem.

Well, the entire game is flipped to be geographically the opposite of the Wii version as well.

 

[The_legend_of_drtre]

Yeah that could very well be. I haven't played any real Wii games other than Wii Sports.

You haven't played Galaxy? The real time intro to Galaxy alone should give you an idea of Wii's power over the GC. Quite a few moments in Galaxy are very 360-esque abiet lower resolution. Great looking game.

 

[swaaye]

Should be getting Galaxy from my sis for Xmas.